It is what it is

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously speculated that his grandchildren might only work 15 hours per week—which, spread across consecutive 7.5-hour workdays, amounts to a two-day workweek—thanks to technological advances and consequent increases in productivity and efficiency. Of course, nearly a century since his prediction, it seems only like wishful thinking. According to sociologist Jamie McCallum, Americans’ work hours have in fact increased, on the whole, since the 1970s. Much of today’s overwork is driven by part-time hours and unpredictable scheduling within the low-wage sector, a practice that forces workers to cobble together a living from multiple unstable jobs, as well as spend more and more time looking for work, traveling between jobs, or preparing for their next shift. “Overwork and underwork are both two sides of the same coin, with a shared feature of increasing stress and intensity, and people sometimes even experience them simultaneously,” McCallum told Jacobin last month.

While no nation has yet achieved the 15-hour workweek, Keynes was nevertheless correct that advancements in technology and efficiency have made it possible to reduce working hours while still keeping the economy running. (The late anthropologist David Graeber argued that “bullshit jobs” have proliferated to fill the gap between the amount of labor that society needs to keep functioning and the number of people who need jobs to survive.) In other words, the tightening vise of simultaneous overwork and underwork—perhaps never more visible than during a pandemic that resulted in mass layoffs and explicitly divided the workforce into essential and nonessential workers—is only the product of various political commitments, not some immutable aspect of nature. As sociologist Juliet Schor told Marketwatch earlier this year, it was the erosion of organized labor and decades of stagnant wages that made it impossible for workers, rather than employers, to benefit from increases in productivity. “Employers have had increasing desire for workers to work long hours,” she said. “And workers haven’t had the power to resist that upward pressure.”

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